Speechless
by TheCicada
Summary: "Ryuuji was on his death bed, and all Isa wanted to do was to crawl in beside him." This is pretty much just an elaboration on Ryuuji's death, with one-sided Isa x Ryuuji. So, uh, there's death and Isa being angsty.


AN: It goes without saying, I should think, that this fic involves character death and that death is a pretty big theme. Don't know how well I handled it though...  
I kept with human!hatos because the fic involves a lot of touch and I knew I'd end up way too concerned with semantics and such if I tried to do the birdie thing. And I'm a human… it's easier.

Also, I totally don't remember the dialogue between the two in this scene from the game, so it's paraphrased from memory. Oh well.

Yay pseudoscience!

* * *

**Speechless**

The first time Isa held Ryuuji's hand was when he died.

There was only one window in the small hospital room and by the ashen quality of the light angling through it, Isa estimated that it must have been late afternoon. A sterile plastic cup full of water sat on the bedside table where it had been placed by a nurse for him hours ago. His mouth and throat were dry, but he didn't move to take it. The seat beneath him was rubbery and uncomfortable, especially for the fact that he hadn't stood up since that morning. His hands had been still where they were for who knew how long – his right lying as heavy as ever in his lap; his left hand, the more deft of the two, covering Ryuuji's.

The incessant rhythm of a heart monitor reminded Isa of how low Ryuuji's blood pressure had become. The blunt note, repeating without a trace of the fatigue it represented, spread itself over Isa's thoughts like a fog, clouding them into something monochromatic. Every thought was inadequate in comparison to the unthinkable image that lay before him. The pallor in Ryuuji's hand was a shade that seemed to breach Isa's colour blindness. It was a white tint he could never have concocted with his imagination – not when worn on Ryuuji's taut, warm skin. He had covered that pale hand with his own and was now left with nothing to look at but Ryuuji's face, his implacable expression. Ryuuji was on his death bed and all Isa wanted to do was to crawl in beside him.

A mere week ago, Isa had been internally rejoicing at the thought that there he was, on an uncharted island, full of thus-far undiscovered species of plant and insect life, facing a full weekend of doing nothing but classifying them according to family and genome and doing so with nobody but Ryuuji. He didn't want to admit that he felt a sense of triumph and bliss at the thought that, out of any accomplished biologist in their department, all of them older and more experienced than Isa, Ryuuji had asked Isa to accompany him.

It seemed to Isa that the offer enshrined all that he once didn't dare believe. That he felt like more than an orphaned prodigy when he was with Ryuuji, that when Ryuuji brought him coffee in the morning – strong, no sugar but with a dash of milk – it meant that Ryuuji's friendly nature was not the sole reason for the extension of friendship to his much younger colleague. Over the two years they had spent together, Isa had accepted but not been comfortable trusting the reality that they were friends. Ryuuji was his friend and his cohort, and Isa had the silent honour of being his confidante. But his own sense of inadequacy tortured Isa. From the image of his own skinny body in the mirror when morning approached and he still could not sleep for the imaginary warmth at his back, to the scar there with all the ruin it implied, he was threaded inside and out with various strands of shame. There were hands forever fluttering across his mind when his thoughts drifted to Ryuuji and his jovial mannerisms, his hair and his unapologetic grin, and it made Isa grimace at himself all the more to think of. He had once apologised for never saying much, an understatement of the self-resentment he carried like an ache, everywhere he went.

"You don't need to say anything," Ryuuji had said. "I can tell you're listening. You're so good at just listening."

And when Ryuuji looked him in the eye and reassured him, Isa felt it would be a disservice to him to assume that he was lying.

So when Isa had been invited on the trip, what he felt was a sense of billowing disbelief that left him light-headed. It seemed that feeling had carried over until six days ago, when Isa had been awoken by the sound of Ryuuji being sick, and he had gathered himself out of bed, fumbling in the dark for his glasses as he asked what was wrong. It stretched languidly into the dawn as the two of them returned separately to the mainland, Ryuuji via an emergency helicopter and Isa via the ferry they had already bought tickets for, hours of pacing and collecting his wits later. And it remained with him now, aloft inside his head, as he looked at Ryuuji, twenty-seven years old, viceless but for his love of research, kind even to him and dying far too suddenly to seem plausible.

The inside of his mind, once blotted by suppressed passion and neglected fears, was scratched startlingly empty by the colourless white of the bed sheets, like light on his retinas. The blind spot in his understanding of what was happening shielded him from a sense of dread that he observed, detachedly, looming some hours or perhaps days ahead of him, when he knew the information that Ryuuji was dead would crash down around him and render him sharply out of his stupor.

But for now all he could do was stare and listen. The disease was incurable and quick to kill, that much had become apparent after a few blood tests – although Isa had to badger the doctors to allow him to view the results for himself, even after showing them his laboratory ID. It seemed that Ryuuji's specific genome made him alone susceptible to the virus. Isa was safe.

_But why?_ Isa wondered idly. Ryuuji was the one with a family. He was the only reason Isa felt at all compelled to aspire to a future free of the remnants of his own past. If Ryuuji died, then he'd be leaving behind a wife and a child. And he'd be leaving behind Isa, alone and as good as dead. But what was logical to think? What did logic matter? Despite that Isa knew perfectly well what was happening, the room around him didn't seem to have a place in the real world. Nothing made sense.

Two hours ago, he had spoken to Isa for the last time.

"I can't believe it," he lulled, his chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly, his breath inaudible. "I'll never see my wife… or my son… again." His eyes were dull, twin ghosts that were all that remained of the vividly clear gaze Isa used to see between smiling eyelids. "I know I didn't care enough. I knew I'd regret it… someday. I wasn't good enough to them." His eyes closed as though drowsy with predawn slumber. Isa had seen that very look on his face the morning previous, when he awoke early and stayed in bed to look on Ryuuji in the one beside his. Now it was just more exhausted. "Hey… Isa."

"Yes, sir?"

"If you ever meet Ryouta… I mean, you don't have to go looking or anything… but – could you do him a favour? On my behalf?"

Isa's voice left his mouth as an empty husk, trembling on the air. "Of course."

"Just… if he asks for something. Could you try… give it to him?"

"Of course, sir." He hadn't meant to whisper. Ryuuji's eyes strained open and his hand tensed, then he relaxed again with a low sigh.

"Thanks, Isa. For everything. You're great." His eyes rolled shut again. Isa could barely see his lips move as he spoke again – "Don't cry…"

One beep of the heart monitor was suspended in the air for too long. Isa drew his face up to glance at it and saw a stable white line stretching across the screen. Isa stared at it as a nurse scurried into the room and assessed the situation, but nothing could be done, and so upon the arrival of a doctor to pronounce Ryuuji dead, the medical equipment was wheeled away. When Isa looked back at Ryuuji, a cloth had been placed ceremoniously over his face, hiding it.

"Would you like to stay awhile?" One woman asked sympathetically. Without looking at her, he nodded, and was left alone.

The room was quiet. The hand beneath Isa's was warm, despite the coolness of the extremities. The world seemed to be drifting away in paper shards, starting at the edge of the universe and ending with them, the nucleus. But they were here. The fading sunlight was a time-bomb marking the collapse of Isa's mind, and he knew it well.

Slowly, as though afraid to disturb the sudden peace, the eye of an incorrigible storm, Isa's free hand pulled the cloth away from Ryuuji's features. With shaking hands, he folded it and set it on the table, winding his hand beneath Ryuuji's and lifting it, encased in his clammy palms, to his lips.

"Can you hear me?" Isa mouthed. The body gave no reply. Ryuuji's slender fingers were marked with vague splotches, his nails slightly darker than the rest of his skin.

Isa gently laid Ryuuji's hand down and pulled away the covers, sliding off his own hospital slippers before hesitating on the edge of his seat. But he laid himself next to Ryuuji and replaced the blanket around the both of them, huddling as far from the edge and as close to Ryuuji as he dared. The man's hair was soft on Isa's temple when he rested his head beside Ryuuji's small pillow. Carefully, so as not to move him, Isa slid his arm beneath Ryuuji's neck and cradled his shoulders, his other arm reaching across his body for the hand that lay by his side. He was still warm. Isa didn't want that warmth to dissipate. He didn't want Ryuuji to waste into a collection of decayed parts and unfeeling interfaces, lost to the cessation of his body. He hadn't the capacity to imagine that tomorrow, Ryuuji would no longer exist. That he didn't.

So Isa clung to him. His fingers lazily grasped Ryuuji's as he pressed his cheek into Ryuuji's neck, closing his eyes and imagining he could feel a pulse beneath his skin. "Can you hear me?" he repeated, his voice this time almost conversational. He wondered how long someone lasted once their body was dead. He tried to filter through his knowledge – the process of dying, from a scientific standpoint, an immediate observational hypothesis and even what little he knew of spiritual approaches – and found he did not know. There was something he wanted to say, his lips still parted on the question he could never receive an answer for.

The temperature of the body beside him would soon descend into neutrality, leaving whatever growth that had been fostered inside Isa since meeting Ryuuji to wilt. They would both curl up and dry out, withering into nothing. But the difference was that Isa would still walk, his gait uneven, scars inside and out, the depleted remnants of what he prayed he could be wandering the world in his body. Perhaps one day he would feel betrayed.

The sun had finally left the room to the coming night. The air was a morose grey, the blare of the overhead lights sparing the space for now. Only a residual glow lit the hospital bed as, with cold finality, Isa held the man he never dared to love aloud.


End file.
